Episode 447
===

[00:00:00] President JFK: For the eyes of the world now look into space to the moon and to the planets beyond. 

[00:00:09] John Mulnix: This is the Space Shot, episode 447, the Lunar Era part Two Vast Loneliness. I'm John Mulnix. Hey everybody. It's been a little bit longer than two weeks, obviously. Um, Astrid had a cold, then I had a nasty bug that knocked me out a bit over this last week and a half to two weeks.

[00:00:28] John Mulnix: So apologies for this coming out way later than I'd hoped. Releases every two weeks are a bit ambitious due to my free time being pretty non-existent on weekends. Um, so I'm gonna aim for part three of this series to be out by Thanksgiving. I'm realizing I need to give myself a little bit more breathing room for these episodes.

[00:00:48] John Mulnix: Also, I usually ask for this at the end of a podcast, but please send any questions or feedback to me, john@thespaceshot.com. These episodes take a ton of [00:01:00] time to record and edit, and I'd love to hear from you. If you've got questions or comments, just drop me a note, and while you're at it, I would love it if you could leave a review or rate the podcast in your podcast app of choice.

[00:01:12] John Mulnix: Now, let's get to this episode.

[00:01:24] Dwight Eisenhower: The Atomic age has moved forward at such a pace that every citizen of the world should have some comprehension, at least in comparative terms of the extent of this development of the utmost significance to every one of us. 

[00:01:45] T. Keith Glennan: Ladies and gentlemen, today we are introducing to you and to the world. These seven men who have been selected to begin training for Orbital Space Flight.

[00:01:57] T. Keith Glennan: It's my pleasure to introduce to [00:02:00] you and I consider it a very real honor. Gentlemen from your right, Malcolm S Carpenter, Leroy G Cooper, John h Glen, Virgil I Grissom, Walter m Shira, Alan B. Shepherd. Donald k Slaton. These ladies and gentlemen are the nation's Mercury astronauts. 

[00:02:31] President JFK: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

[00:02:42] JFK assassination report: President John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. Was shot to death today by a hidden assassin, armed with a high powered rifle. The 46-year-old president lived about 30 minutes after a sniper cut him down as his limousine left downtown [00:03:00] Dallas.

[00:03:06] John Mulnix: At the end of World War II, there were two superpowers that emerged from the conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union. This coming space, age and Cold War would define the 20th century in ways that no one could have imagined as World War II came to an end in 1945. Before we get any further in today's episode, let's orient ourselves a little bit in history with a brief timeline of events.

[00:03:32] John Mulnix: In the closing days of World War II, allied forces raced to capture the min and material that comprised Germany's V two Rocket Program. The rockets that were meant to rain down on London and Antwerp and other Allied cities were captured as were the engineers, including Vernon Braun, who ended up surrendering to the allies and also countless others who came to the United States under Operation Paperclip.

[00:03:58] John Mulnix: On the flip side, the Soviets did the same in the [00:04:00] East. The stage for what would become the Cold War was being set. In 1949, the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb ending America's nuclear monopoly. That's a subject for a whole nother episode. Another big event that took place in 1949. The United States helped steer the creation of nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Soviet Union countered by signing the Warsaw Hack a few years later in 1955.

[00:04:28] John Mulnix: The lines of the coming Cold War were being drawn up, and obviously this is a super quick overview of a lot of incredible history that took place during those years. So apologies for glossing over or oversimplifying some things. The late 1940s and fifties were also a time when incredible amounts of money were spent on basic research in what we now consider STEM fields.

[00:04:52] John Mulnix: The creation of the first transistor by Bell Labs in 1947. The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in [00:05:00] 1953, the polio vaccine in 1955, the first American atomic power station later in the fifties. I could do an entire series just on the 1950s and sixties. Then on October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union shocked the world with Sputnik.

[00:05:19] John Mulnix: This polished metal sphere about the size of a beach ball crossed the night sky, along with its carrier rocket broadcasting its telltale beep. A few months after Sputnik, the United States responded with explorer one. There was also the National Aeronautics and Space Act that was signed in 1958, which created NASA just a few years after that, the first humans launched to space during the Vostok and Mercury programs for the Soviet Union and the United States respectively.

[00:05:50] John Mulnix: President Kennedy committed the United States to a moon landing when NASA had a grand total of about 15 minutes of space flight experience after Al Shepherd became the first [00:06:00] American in space. During his suborbital launch on May 5th, 1961, Shepherd's Launch came just weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth on April 12th, 1961.

[00:06:14] John Mulnix: About two years after these flights, president Kennedy was assassinated, but in the years following his death, America pressed on with his lunar promise. All right, so that's about as condensed of a historical timeline as I can give for this episode, but I wanted to set that stage before we talk with Francis French.

[00:06:33] John Mulnix: In today's episode, when we talk about the space race and the Apollo program, it's easy to start with rockets or the technology of the day. There's incredibly powerful engines. What was then state-of-the-art guidance system, computers, incredible miniaturized components that were really ahead of the time.

[00:06:56] John Mulnix: But as Francis reminds us, the heart of the story isn't the [00:07:00] technology. It's the people living through a strange moment when human courage, fear, and politics all collided in an incredible confluence of events. That became one of the defining eras in history. Let's learn about what could be considered humanity's, boldest, adventure so far.

[00:07:27] Francis French: My name is Francis French. I am a space historian. I love writing the human stories of space flight. The technology is important, but it's backdrop for me. I have a lot of engineers I rely on to make sure the technology is correct. What I really like getting into are the very human stories of space flight from a female textile engineer to a hot shot test pilot.

[00:07:48] Francis French: Nobody had the same background of story. The only thing they had in common is one day they're sitting on top of a rocket and whatever happened that day was gonna be an interesting day. I love writing and giving [00:08:00] talks about the space race because it is a very weird little chapter in human history. It's almost like a part of the 21st century got thrown back into the middle of the 20th.

[00:08:09] Francis French: Can almost understand the conspiracy theories to say how did we do that at that time? And we've never been able to do it since. It is a weird little aberration in history, uh, that for four short years we went to the moon, and so far we've not sent humans back again. And the reasons it happened are not so much to do with technology, it's more to do with the, with political will and a need to beat the Soviets in an arena that wasn't war.

[00:08:36] Francis French: For the very first time in human history, nobody could really win an all-out war. 'cause for the very first time we had nuclear weapons and so everybody would lose if a full scale war went out. How do you fight a war without firing those rockets? You repurpose those rockets to send people into space or satellites into space, and in doing so, you show a technical superiority.

[00:08:57] Francis French: This is still something that's going on today, [00:09:00] and you can persuade other countries that you have more power and influence and maybe come along with you and at a time where. A lot of the world was deciding whether to go communist or capitalist. This was a very important thing. That's the reason the Vietnam War happened, the so-called domino theory, where if you lose one country to the communist, you're gonna lose all of them.

[00:09:17] Francis French: So this was a strategic chess game going on. The technology was in many ways, a simple part. It was fiendishly complicated, but compared to political will, compared to voter will, compared to taxpayer money, compared to all the other things that had to line up, this was difficult.

[00:09:39] Francis French: It was a very weird time in history. Again, maybe the reason it hasn't happened again is 'cause these very specific set of circumstances will never repeat in precisely the same way. Soviet Union got destroyed in World War ii. They won in theory, against the Nazis. The Nazis invaded, destroyed a huge part of the western part of the country, and then were.

[00:09:59] Francis French: [00:10:00] Routed back, Soviets won, but a lot of their country was devastated. They were known primarily as an agricultural backwater. Technologically, nobody really rated them very highly. So what better way to show that you have roared back and restored national pride than to beat the so-called technologically superior countries in a brand new arena, a brand new frontier as people were calling it, which is space.

[00:10:29] Francis French: Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, you know, he grew up in a village, in an agricultural collective that got invaded by the Nazis, and then the warfront came through again a second time as the Red Army pushed them back. Everything was taken of value. Really old people and little kids like Yuri were surviving.

[00:10:47] Francis French: They were literally living in a hole in the ground. They dug themselves. They had no schooling. He saw his siblings taken off to slave labor camps and didn't know if they'd survived until the end of the war. Fortunately, they did. He saw his brother hang [00:11:00] from a tree by a Nazi officer. Fortunately, he survived too.

[00:11:03] Francis French: This is the kind of brutality that happened to the Soviet Union. So to have this kid about 15 years later become the first person in space was not just a symbol. This had literally happened to these people. And to have somebody who had gone through that becoming the person who flies a technological marvel was the ultimate comeback story for the Soviet Union.

[00:11:24] Francis French: To do so. They were very secret about it. You can do that when it's a completely controlled country, a controlled economy, controlled information. They took the rockets that were designed to launch nuclear weapons, and they turned them into rockets that could send the first satellites to the moon. They could send the first satellites into orbit, send the first creatures into space, and ultimately the first people into space.

[00:11:46] Francis French: And it surprised America in particular, but most of the West, it was a huge shock. You saw newspaper articles saying, why are we spending time focusing on putting Chrome fins on [00:12:00] cars when they are sending things to the moon? We thought they were a country that could at best make a rudimentary tractor, and here they are.

[00:12:07] Francis French: Outpacing us in everything. The unspoken side of it too was if they could send rockets into space that easily, they could launch missiles pretty much anywhere in the world. And, uh, that was an unspoken but clear danger to the rest of the world too. Soviet Union at the time was still relying on valves and pre microelectronics.

[00:12:27] Francis French: Their rockets had to be a lot bigger 'cause they had to deliver a much bigger nuclear bomb. So a drawback having a worst bomb. Meant a bigger rocket, which meant when it came to the space race, they could launch huge payloads where America was struggling to get anything off the launch pad without it blowing up.

[00:12:46] Francis French: It was also ironic because the reason the Soviets had better rockets was because they had worse technology. America was getting better and better at creating microcircuits, at reducing the size of things and making all kinds of [00:13:00] electronic things smaller. A lot of military applications, but also that related to satellites.

[00:13:04] Francis French: So you didn't need as big a rocket for a satellite. You didn't need as much of a rocket for a nuclear weapon 'cause you could make it smaller.

[00:13:13] John Mulnix: Sputniks beeps sparked panic, but also purpose. The fear that the United States had fallen behind helped fund new labs, new classrooms, and other ways of teaching kids about science. The race to catch up didn't just build rockets. It helped spark curiosity. As Francis noted, sometimes fear can motivate a society to move faster than inspiration ever could.

[00:13:38] Francis French: There'd been a long running debate about whether it was okay to fly over other countries, and if so, how high you could be and get away with it. This is something that still happens. We see various countries sending jets across borders and straight back just to keep pushing that envelope and testing the other country's responsiveness.

[00:13:54] Francis French: Around this time, of course, the US was flying U2 flights over the Russia high enough. [00:14:00] They thought that they couldn't be detected and certainly not shot down until they were detected and shot down. So this was an ongoing. Conversation around this time, the idea that you could send a satellite around the earth and fly over everywhere, it's pretty much impossible not to send something into space and overly a whole bunch of countries.

[00:14:18] Francis French: So it was kind of moot, and there is some conversation amongst historians as to whether it was beneficial for America to go second with the Soviets then having done it already, the Soviets couldn't complain when America was flying over. The Soviet Union. However, I think that may be more of a way of saving face after something had already happened because the comparative side of it was American citizens being absolutely terrified at literally being able to see part of Sputnik, the first rocket going over.

[00:14:54] Francis French: The actual ball of Sputnik. The first satellite was too small to essentially be seen, but what people forget [00:15:00] is the entire carrier rocket, a much bigger piece of technology. Essentially, the dead last stage of the rocket that had got that satellite into orbit was following it. That was silvery. It was big.

[00:15:11] Francis French: And so people could see this bright light coming over. Around that time, they could hear a very simple radio signal from the actual satellite, so you could hear it going beep, beep, beep. On your radio. You could see this light in the sky. It was terrifying to people 'cause they knew a light in the sky coming over could easily take a downward turn and be a bomb.

[00:15:29] Francis French: And there was a lot of speculation. Are these satellites carrying other things that could be dropped on us? The Soviet Union, by having comparatively big dumb rockets, was an advantage in many ways, and you still hear this, if you talk to pilots, they'll say sometimes it's better to fly a single engine airplane than it is to fly a much more complicated multi-engine.

[00:15:51] Francis French: Because if you're. If your engine goes out, you're a glider. You look for somewhere to land. If you are a multi-engine airplane, you lose one engine, you might be tempted to press on, [00:16:00] and at which point you get yourself in serious problems and you crash and you die. So sometimes simpler is better. And this is something we've seen throughout the space program, having a rocket that could launch in almost any weather through rain, through clouds, through everything, just send people into space at a precise second.

[00:16:16] Francis French: In the meantime, during the space shuttle era. Wrong kind of lightning, rain, you name it. I think astronaut story. Musgrave, um, described the shuttle as being a butterfly attached to a brick. And it was a, having a much more complicated thing, can make things a lot more sensitive, can make things a lot more temperamental.

[00:16:33] Francis French: Advances in technology are not always to the benefit. If you've got something that just works well enough, like many of us keep our old clunkers of a car 'cause we could upgrade to the fanciest car, but hey, it still works, why not? Let's keep using it. So that disadvantage on paper the Soviet Unions had was actually an advantage.

[00:16:54] Francis French: It is hard to define completely where the symbolic and the actual literal nuts and bolts [00:17:00] combined. It's a bit of both. We saw something happen, which is quite common in history and is happening again now as people start talking about, is being a leading science nation really important to world dominance?

[00:17:12] Francis French: We see the Chinese, for example, doing things that have no particular strategic or economic advantage, but it just makes them look like a superpower. That is very important and always has been, and pretty much always will be. What we saw with the flight of Sputnik in 1957, terrified America. A lot of the hands-on science centers you've seen around America, now were a result of that.

[00:17:35] Francis French: For example, I'm here in San Diego and at that time. City leaders went, we need a hall of science. We need to be educating our children. We can't do everything this year. We, but we need to catch up and we need to not only have professional engineers now, we need to have college students. We need to have little kids going doing it.

[00:17:51] Francis French: And it took a while for a lot of these science centers to open, but a lot of the things you saw open in the seventies, our result of that national fervor in the late fifties to catch up. A lot of that [00:18:00] is psychological. That is as important as the literal can. We build better rockets and fly better rockets.

[00:18:06] Francis French: The advantage the Soviet Union had is it's a huge area of land, the entire USSR, and they could launch and land things without anybody really being able to detect them very easily. Sergei Khrushchev, the leader of the country at the time, was making statements such as they could roll out rockets, like sausages out of a sausage machine.

[00:18:25] Francis French: There was some information that I've been reading about recently in a book about how the CIA and other people pretty much quickly established that the rocket capability was nothing like that. But when you find things out in secret about the slow pace of how many rockets, Russia could actually make.

[00:18:43] Francis French: You can't necessarily divulge that to the public. So the public was hearing the leader of the Soviet Union saying, we are getting these rockets off the press. We're getting them ready to go. We could launch hundreds of them at any time. And it sounded terrifying. That was more important, the propaganda aspect of it, which both countries did propaganda [00:19:00] just as much as each other.

[00:19:01] Francis French: The civilian versus military was also very interesting. There was a lot of conversation about we should go to the moon for scientific purposes. We should go on to Mars and elsewhere for scientific purposes. Personally, I am a huge advocate of that. Historically, nobody really cared about the science in the upper echelons of deciding it was an engineering project, and the engineering was a way of having a proxy war.

[00:19:26] Francis French: It was a way of saying, look, our engineering is choosing military officers to do peaceful things, choosing civilians to do peaceful things, doing things that have a stated. Science objective, but really we're flexing our muscles engineering wise to show that should we choose to make this all military, we could wipe the floor with anybody else in the world.

[00:19:49] Francis French: One thing when I give talks, which I do around the world at this point about the space race and the Cold War, is how much the Soviet Union were relying on one-off stunts. They were putting the first person in [00:20:00] space, putting the first animal in space, putting the first satellite in space, and by the time of the mid sixties, they were wasting time developing a brand new generation of spacecraft because they were doing one-offs.

[00:20:11] Francis French: How can we make the very first space walk? We'll have an inflatable bounce house type structure on the side of a spacecraft we'll use once and never use again. How do we get three people into space when only single seater spacecraft have flown before? We'll take a one seater spacecraft, we'll strip everything out, we'll cram three people in, we'll launch it and hope for the best.

[00:20:28] Francis French: It was dangerous. It was many ways foolhardy, and it set them back and it's one of many reasons why they didn't make it to the moon before America. 

[00:20:37] John Mulnix: As Francis noted, the Soviets had a string of firsts, but they were running out of momentum and one-offs to upstage the United States. The United States in the meantime had the patience and funding for the time being as well as a goal still, when Apollo eight left Earth orbit, it wasn't patients that got NASA there.

[00:20:59] John Mulnix: It was [00:21:00] audacity. This mission was a gamble that skipped a lot of steps. It even defied NASA's own test flight sequence. By taking this chance, this mission ended up redefining how humans see our home world. 

[00:21:14] Francis French: Apollo eight was almost like that Soviet way of doing things because America had a very slow, incremental, step-by-step idea of going to the moon with people, and before people even got off the ground.

[00:21:28] Francis French: In January of 1967, the first Apollo crew died in a fire on the launchpad. The idea that. In the next year, humans would make it to the moon. Seems almost impossible, but the accident report wouldn't be even be finished these days, but somehow they did that and. To do that, basically they flew one mission, Apollo seven with humans the very next mission, Apollo eight.

[00:21:50] Francis French: They sent humans around the moon into lunar orbit, which is even more dangerous than just slingshot them around the back. To do that is incredibly dangerous, uh, for a [00:22:00] satin five rocket that humans had never launched on before. It had not had any explosions, but at the same time, it had serious vibration issues.

[00:22:07] Francis French: They had not fixed. To do that was almost Soviet in its audacity. So to go from, you've had two Apollo missions before, one, the crew was killed by you. The second one, you did it, but you were in the relative safety of earth orbit. You could come back anytime for the next mission to go all the way out to the far side the moon, where if something went wrong, there's no way of helping you.

[00:22:28] Francis French: People forget what a huge, dangerous step Apollo eight was, and if anything had gone wrong, we would be looking at it as a mistake of. Arrogance and bravado. And yet, because immediately things kept going. Apollo nine, Apollo 10, Apollo 11, boom moon landing, it gets forgotten. And that's a shame. And I hope, you know, people listening to this are gonna realize just how monumental that mission was.

[00:22:53] Francis French: Everybody focuses on Apollo 11. Everybody focuses on people walking on the moon and they forget the first time humans left [00:23:00] Earth orbit in any way. It was a transformative moment in human history. There were historians at the time talking it about it, like evolution. The first time something crawled out the ocean and walked on land.

[00:23:11] Francis French: It's that kind of moment and there can only ever be a first. So to leave Earth Orbit was huge. To go around the moon was huge. To slow down to the point where you're in lunar orbit and that rocket has to work to get you back because unlike launching from Earth, there are not hundreds of thousands of people there ready to help you in person.

[00:23:29] Francis French: It either works, so you would still be there. So those things all had to work. It was a very dramatic mission doing very much what the Soviets had done, which was to. Ignore some of the safety things, ignore some of the other missions. They'd planned to just test things incrementally bit by bit to be very confident in what they had and just go for it.

[00:23:48] Francis French: And in doing so, the space race was essentially over. The Russians might still have landed first on the moon. If America had had another tragedy such as the Apollo one fire. However, [00:24:00] it was extremely unlikely at that point. Essentially the, the moon race was over.

[00:24:08] John Mulnix: While Apollo eight didn't land and it didn't collect moon rocks, it gave us something more lasting and important perspective while looking at the moon. I don't think the astronauts could have expected the most profound discovery to be in the distance. That photo known as Earthrise is when the crew of Apollo eight took their cameras and pointed them at Earth.

[00:24:33] John Mulnix: Science writer Rebecca Boyle joins us again to talk about how this incredible photo, seeing our world hanging in the blackness of space, fragile, finite, and beautiful, changed how we think about ourselves. 

[00:24:48] Rebecca Boyle: I think 2000 years ago, people would've been so confused by so many aspects of it that it would've been hard for them to even grasp.

[00:24:57] Rebecca Boyle: There's so many priors you have to assume [00:25:00] to even be able to register that picture as real. It was the beginning of the space age still, but we had seen pictures of Earth from above. We had seen pictures from the history of aviation, you know, half century of aviation before that. And we had seen pictures from the first s.

[00:25:17] Rebecca Boyle: So we had like a common language to be able to perceive that earth rise image and, and make sense of it in a way that people 300 years earlier wouldn't have been able to do. I think Galileo and Kepler and their contemporaries would've probably understood it a little better because they really were on this cusp of modernity.

[00:25:39] Rebecca Boyle: Like I think Kepler is this like transitional fossil, you know, he stands. Sort of abreast two worlds from the medieval period, which starts to end, you know, in the Renaissance and before the Enlightenment. Like Kepler is kind of the fulcrum between these two worlds. And so I feel like he could have made more sense of it, and [00:26:00] he figured out the orbits of planets.

[00:26:01] Rebecca Boyle: He figured out a lot of really fundamental truths about the physical nature of the universe that I think would've helped him understand it. There's, I guess there's two ways of answering that question. The sort of bizarre nature of seeing the planet from apart from the planet is so incomprehensible if you step back and think about it for a minute, and then just the technology that you would need to like even be able to make sense of it at all, and I think took a long time.

[00:26:31] Rebecca Boyle: I still think people don't really actually understand what it means that we live on a spherical planet orbiting a star and. A kind of lonely, quiet corner of one spiral arm of a giant spiral galaxy and one part of an expanding universe. And you know, it still is kind of hard to understand. Still kind of hard to wrap your mind around.

[00:26:55] Rebecca Boyle: Yeah. Earthrise, I think is, it's hard to overstate how much [00:27:00] that image changed the world, and people said it at the time. There's so many great contemporary accounts of seeing those images and seeing the first landing like 10 months later, um, to see what that, what that did to our understanding of our place in the universe and our place on this planet and the role that we play on this planet.

[00:27:24] Francis French: It is very important historically and in terms of human understanding to realize we never know what's gonna happen until we do it. We can think we know, but we don't. If, for example, you watch movies right up to Stanley Kubrick's 2001, which came out around the time of Apollo eight, but was filmed before, what people thought it would be like around the moon, doesn't look like the pictures.

[00:27:45] Francis French: It doesn't look like the imagery. 'cause until you go, you just don't know what it's like. The same in terms of the human experience. A totally understandable reason for going to the moon turned out to be not the main reason to go there. Why did we go to the moon? We go to the moon to [00:28:00] understand the moon, to look at the moon closer, to understand where that weird place that's often the distance is sort of silvery disc, that we don't really get a sense of three dimensions.

[00:28:10] Francis French: What is it? Let's go look at it closer. That was the reason to go. But that's not what they learned from that mission, that they did learn a lot off of that, but that was not the primary thing they got back. The weirder thing is the further away we went from our own planet, the more we understood our own planet.

[00:28:24] Francis French: It seems completely counterintuitive, but that's what actually happened. Bill Anders, one of the three crew people on that mission, was looking down at the moon from the little windows in the Apollo spacecraft looking down at the moon thinking. Not much looks good down there. Um, I got to talk to him a lot about this in person and he's like, I didn't like the moon.

[00:28:42] Francis French: It was beat up and gray and dirty. It looked like a dirty beach and no life, no evidence of anything that would interest me. Nah, I'm good. And then for the very first time in human history, looked out the window and saw this tiny blue disc of our own earth rising. Above the Luna Horizon, [00:29:00] and it was the only thing out there that had any color.

[00:29:04] Francis French: It was the only thing out there that had any light. It was reflecting the light in the same way that the moon reflects the light. So it looked like it was glowing, and he thought about it in that moment and later and realized everything. He knows everybody who's ever lived and died. Everybody he loves, everything he has spent time his entire life experiencing is all on this tiny little disc.

[00:29:25] Francis French: It looks so fragile and so tiny that he could put his thumb up at arm's length and make it completely disappear. And the idea that the Earth was that fragile had never really come to the fore in human understanding in such a major way Before there had been pictures of the earth from lunar distance taken by satellites, but they didn't have the same emotional impact as a human being behind a camera.

[00:29:47] Francis French: Taking a picture. And it's that kind of unexpected that you don't know until you do it. We don't know what we're gonna learn when we go back to the moon when we go onto Mars, 'cause we won't know until we get there. And it's those kind of moments. And so [00:30:00] Apollo eight often gets overlooked because there's this transcendent moment where we begin to understand our own planet.

[00:30:05] Francis French: By leaving it. And in doing so, it kickstarted the environmental movement. Just a couple of years later, a lot of the things that have come along to protect our planet from ourselves came from that because when we're on the planet, we look at what looks like a flat horizon. We look at what looks like an infinite ocean, infinite land, and we go, this is very big.

[00:30:24] Francis French: We can't really hurt this. And when you get that far away and you see how tiny it is and how fragile it is, then it's a whole different experience. 

[00:30:34] John Mulnix: Sadly, that incredible perspective seeing Earth from lunar orbit was only seen by the nine Apollo crews who ventured to the moon. Another thing that's always surprised me is just how brief the Apollo lunar missions are in the grand historical scheme, just four years between December, 1968 and December, 1972.

[00:30:59] Francis French: [00:31:00] It is very true how quick that program was. It's like the Beatles career, essentially. Early sixties. You got the first formative records by the time of 19 69, 19 70, it's all over it, and yet these guys are not even 30 yet, and they have four decades, some of them ahead of their lives to do other stuff, but they're the things we all remember them for and this tiny little narrow blip of time.

[00:31:24] Francis French: The same with the Apollo program. I think the idea was that America was going to gradually create airplanes that were gonna get higher and higher, like the X 15. They were gonna go suborbital. Eventually an airplane would go into space. Cold War changed all that. They was putting people on top of nuclear capable rockets and hoping for the best, and it worked out.

[00:31:43] Francis French: But it meant that a rushed program to beat the Soviets had somewhat of a natural lending. And after Apollo 11, people were not interested. People in Europe were interested 'cause America was actually doing way more interesting things in Apollo 15, 16 and 17, spending three days on the moon, living and [00:32:00] working on the moon, going to big valleys with huge mountains around driving around.

[00:32:04] Francis French: Doing real geology. It was a different ball game. It wasn't that 11 through 14 were not impressive missions, the most impressive things that humankind had ever done. But 15 through 17 are probably the pinnacle of human exploration then and now humans have not done anything as impressive in terms of pure exploration since, and it gets forgotten.

[00:32:26] Francis French: And most people don't even remember those missions. Right as they were getting really successful into the groove, they were cut. And there's a number of reasons for that. The money was not there because the public will was not there. People stopped watching in America. The taxpayers weren't interested.

[00:32:40] Francis French: We'd landed once. Why do it again? And I get that because it had been touted as a race to beat the Soviets. Once you've won a race, why keep racing? The thing that made Apollo happen, which was a race to the moon, was the ultimate reason. It finished so quickly and the scientists and engineers who were like, we could build a moon base right now, we could keep [00:33:00] going.

[00:33:00] Francis French: Some politicians threw the idea out there, and the, and the reaction was not good from the public, to say the least. So it ended. The other side of it was, it was dangerous. These were incredibly fragile edge of what was possible technologies. We saw with Apollo 13, how fragile they were. We saw with Apollo one how fragile they were.

[00:33:18] Francis French: These are things that could kill people. F terrifyingly easily, things could go wrong. So having got away with Apollo 13, I think they thought, we can't keep doing this. Eventually we're gonna kill a crew. And, uh, so Apollo 17 was a, to my mind, a much too quick ending because the rockets were already built that could take more missions to the moon.

[00:33:36] Francis French: They, everything was paid for, basically you were paying employee time to sit in mission control was the only cost really that was left. And, but that was cut with the idea it was gonna pay for the space shuttle. Maybe you couldn't have both. So at the time, politically, it was the only thing anybody could do.

[00:33:55] John Mulnix: While Earthrise may have cracked the door on our perception of Earth Command [00:34:00] module pilots during the Apollo program, really just kicked it open, seeing the Moon and Earth from what had to have been the loneliest seat in history to astronaut Al Warden, his seat in the command module wasn't a consolation prize.

[00:34:14] John Mulnix: It was a vantage point that no one else had. 

[00:34:18] Francis French: I had the great good fortune to write a book with Al Warden who was on Apollo 15, and again, this was counterintuitive. Most people think about the 12 humans who went down and walked on the surface of the moon. They forget about the other 12 who spent time around the moon either orbiting it or slingshot around the back.

[00:34:34] Francis French: In the case of Apollo 13, and they forget that sometimes those experiences are more important and. It made me think about that. For example, if I was from a different world and I wanted to visit Earth, what would I enjoy the most? Would I want to spend six days as Al did three of them completely alone orbiting our planet, looking down at the sunrises and sunsets and oceans and forests?

[00:34:57] Francis French: Or would I want to land in a gravel pit and walk a couple of [00:35:00] miles in each direction experiencing nothing but that gravel pit? I know which one I would choose. And so Al saw it very much that way. He thought he had the best seat on the flight. He was able to. Experienced the moon in a very different way, and in doing so, he was able to look back at the earth and his experiences, like everybody who went to the moon had different profound experiences, some more than others, some externalized more than others.

[00:35:22] Francis French: But he looked at that and he looked at the earth from that distance. Had many of those same experiences from Apollo eight. And then comes a moment where he goes around the far side of the moon. Where the sun is not touching him, where the light reflected from the earth is not touching him. Where all he can see of any surface is the absence of stars.

[00:35:42] Francis French: He's looking out at more stars than he can actually visually take in to the point where the sky looks like a wash of stars, he can't make out constellations. There are just too many stars. There's a point where there's a circular bite out of that, there's a black disc, and he knows that must be the moon, but that's all he can see.

[00:35:58] Francis French: You can see nothing but stars and [00:36:00] the shaded side of the moon. And in looking out into the infinity of the cosmos as the most remote person then and now, he still holds the record by being further away than the two people on the other side of the moon. And then everybody else is back on earth. He's the most remote person in human history.

[00:36:16] Francis French: He's looking out there going, I don't understand what this means. I'm a farm kid from Michigan who happened to love flying airplanes, and then I got this job and now I'm out here. And I am looking at something I don't understand, but I realize I'm the first person to experience this. And it's almost like that sea creature crawling out, the being the first creature on land.

[00:36:35] Francis French: They're not gonna understand land, but they're gonna understand, hey, this is different. And one of the most profound experiences I had of my life is just writing this down with him where he's saying, I don't know what it meant. And almost four decades later when we're writing the book, I still don't know what it means.

[00:36:52] Francis French: But I think in a few hundred years people will begin to contextualize that and understand this was the beginning of something else for humanity. We [00:37:00] are incredibly fortunate to be living in a time where we had the opportunity to. Be around and talk and work with these people because there will be other people who go back to the moon.

[00:37:08] Francis French: We can hope, but they'll never be the first. And that kind of human experience is unique. I've written seven books at the time of doing this. I've essentially finished nine books, all to do with space, all to all working with astronauts and cosmos in some way. And yet, I don't know if I'll ever be as fortunate.

[00:37:29] Francis French: To write that chapter in that book, as I was with Al talking about his time alone around the moon. I can't imagine a better human experience, and if I do end up writing something better than that, I'll be very happy. I doubt I ever will, and if I don't, I'm completely content with what I've done. 

[00:37:47] John Mulnix: What makes Al Warden's story remarkable, wasn't just what he saw, but how he shared it.

[00:37:54] John Mulnix: Teaming up with Fred Rogers. Yes. That Mr. Rogers to show children what space [00:38:00] travel looked like, felt like, and why it mattered was just a stroke of genius. As Francis tells us, these two men from completely different backgrounds, Al Warden and Air Force test pilot, and Fred Rogers, a children's television host and minister were united by their sense of wonder.

[00:38:20] Francis French: So in the runup to AL'S 1971, Apollo 15 Mission, the crew were incredibly busy training for all the things you have to do in a moon mission. But as it got closer to the time, Al started thinking, how can I get the general public more involved and excited about what was going on, particularly young kids.

[00:38:37] Francis French: He reached out to Sesame Street, which was a huge show at the time. And according to Al, he tells it way funnier in the book than I ever can. But they were quite dismissive and poo-pooing of him. And, uh, I'll let the book describe that story in detail. So his next choice was, uh, Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers neighborhood.

[00:38:54] Francis French: And it turned out to be the perfect partnership. 'cause not only did Fred cover the mission, but they worked together for [00:39:00] years afterwards. Fred said he was in the middle of doing a story about. Parents who leave, um, because there's a lot of kids who, one parent would go away work or maybe they were in the military or they had to be away for an extended period of time to help kids.

[00:39:13] Francis French: He thought, let's do episodes about that, and what better way to do that than dad's going to the moon and the footage they got is still some of the best footage from that time. Of any show anywhere, certainly much better than what NASA PR were doing 'cause they were constrained by certain regulations. It shows al trying on the space suit, how a space suit works, how you eat in space, all kinds of stuff.

[00:39:37] Francis French: Fred suggested some questions from kids and, uh, Al took them in an envelope to the moon and once he got back, they opened them and Al answered all these questions the kids had. And so it was a way of the kids actually literally being involved in the mission. He showed up in the studio and he's eating the food, showing Fred how to eat space food, showing him his sunglasses, all kinds of other stuff.

[00:39:58] Francis French: And the great thing about [00:40:00] it is Al is doing it completely straight faced. He's talking to little puppets and queens and all kinds of bizarre things. And yet there he is in this early seventies suit with his glasses on, looking like the quintessential cool astronaut, the quintessential cool seventies guy talking to little hand puppets.

[00:40:18] Francis French: And these. Some of them really ridiculous questions. He's like, well, yes, we did do that. And, and it's great. It's some of the best TV I've ever seen. Last I checked, I hope it's still there over@alwarden.com, the website that, uh, friends and family have still been going. There were some clips only allowable on that website to watch, so you might find some of those clips over there.

[00:40:39] Francis French: But, um, in writing the book together, we went through a whole bunch of them and I watched everything he was on and it was beautiful 'cause they kept going years after his mission. They were two very different people, but they had a great connection, Fred and Al the, there was a time where Al tried to make a slightly risque joke to Fred and got this look like he just made a risque [00:41:00] joke to a preschooler.

[00:41:01] Francis French: It was one of those things that Fred just did not speak that language. So imagining a Air Force test pilot with all the kind of humor and drinking games and stuff that comes with that, and this complete blank face where Al tries to just mix it up a little bit. About as different as you can get. And yet they found this wonderful connection 'cause they were both childlike in their wonder of exploring the universe.

[00:41:22] Francis French: And they both had so much in common in wanting to relate that to the general public. Something that I'll continue to do, we finished a children's book together. His second children's book, he'd written one in the 1970s. We finished one together. It was finished and he passed away before it was published, but he saw it finished and that was a very special thing.

[00:41:40] Francis French: So literally up to the last weeks of his life, he was working on trying to explain the moon and the universe to kids. So back in 1974, he worked on a book with Fred Rogers called, I Want to Know about the Flight to the Moon, in which he went through all the kids' questions and it's a nice book, uh, but it was way [00:42:00] outta print, um, way outta date.

[00:42:02] Francis French: And so, uh. We worked on a book together with the wonderful artist, Michelle Roush, um, who knew Al very well, is also a really great aerospace engineer, and is also an incredible space artist. And an artist in many different genres, but space in particular. So Alan, she sat down and tried to capture. In paint, the kind of the mood of a spacecraft and a going around the moon, not just the actual colors and the literal views, but taking images and riffing off those to come up with actual the experience.

[00:42:31] Francis French: Al also came back from the moon and wrote a book of poems, which was essentially downloading his brain from all the different experiences. He'd felt that he couldn't work out any other way of explaining, so we wove the poems in with the images, and then we wrote some other descriptive dialogue to explain what was going on.

[00:42:46] Francis French: So. Al and Michelle had a great time coming up with these wonderful images. I had a great time. Unpacking what Al was saying in some of these poems that were decades old at this point, and he's literally remembering what it was like to get back from the moon. [00:43:00] Sit is an apartment. People were partying all night.

[00:43:02] Francis French: It's an apartment till two or 3:00 AM celebrating him, coming back from the moon. Then they'd all leave and he'd still be wide awake, unable to sleep with all these thoughts of what it was like. So he started just downloading those experiences and they ended up being poems. So mixing the poems, the images, and the words together.

[00:43:16] Francis French: We got a great children's book that, as you can tell, it's not just for children. Anybody of any age can get something out of it, but it makes for a wonderful children's book. 

[00:43:25] John Mulnix: I'm so glad Francis brought this up because Al Warden understood what so many astronauts struggled with. That coming home is sometimes harder than leaving.

[00:43:36] John Mulnix: The rest of his life. He tried to translate that feeling for the rest of us. And in that sense, he never really stopped exploring. One of the perks of having a little kid is being able to buy them books that you kind of want to read for yourself. So I had to pick up a copy of Astronaut Al Travels to the Moon, which was written by Al Warden Francis French, and was [00:44:00] illustrated by Michelle Rausch, and it's really an incredible book.

[00:44:03] John Mulnix: I'm so glad I got this for Astrid. Let's let Francis tell us a little bit more about that book. 

[00:44:09] Francis French: The experience of going to the moon and coming back is going to be life changing in interesting ways. Some of it may not be within the individual, it may be more the expectations everybody has on them, and that's gonna affect how they can respond to people.

[00:44:23] Francis French: I think the way I imagine it is, imagine you went on a wonderful vacation tomorrow to the Caribbean and you got down there and you sat under a palm tree with a beer and you looked at the beach and you went, this is lovely. And then you get back and the first person who asks you, how was your vacation?

[00:44:38] Francis French: Oh, it was great. I sat under a tree. I had a beer. It was a great time. You're, you're drawing on your original memory and you're telling it firsthand. And then the next day somebody asks you the same question and then the next day. And then the next day, by two weeks in, you're not gonna be drawing on your original thought.

[00:44:51] Francis French: You're gonna be Palm Tree, beer Beach, boom. Done. By year three, you're gonna be stop asking me about the damn palm tree and the damn beach. I'll give you the answer, but [00:45:00] I don't really care. It's like eighties wat hit. Wonder artists who have to play that same hit over and over again, they'll be like, I'll play it.

[00:45:07] Francis French: You can pay me, but I really don't care about this song anymore. So imagine if for the rest of your life, people know about just a couple of years when you were an astronaut and really. Narrow that down to a couple of weeks, maybe a day or two in your life, and that's all people want to talk about. It's very hard to separate how it changed them to how they changed in response to everybody asking them the same darn question every day for the rest of their lives.

[00:45:31] Francis French: And if you look particularly at the 12 humans who walked on the moon, that can be very interesting. The, the test pilots were more test pilot like, you know, peak Conrad, for example. Apollo 12 commander basically said, great, loved it. Had a great time. His internal thoughts were quite intriguing, but his outward thoughts were, there's your answer, you've, you met me, you've got your handshake.

[00:45:52] Francis French: We're good. Other people like Buzz Aldrin had, was not really able to get over the fact that technically he was [00:46:00] second, even though. He landed jointly at the same moment as Neil Armstrong on the moon. Those last couple of feet in a quarter of million mile journey apparently were quite profoundly affecting and he ended up being hospitalized for, um, nervous breakdown for depression.

[00:46:13] Francis French: He had struggled with alcoholism. To his credit, he's been incredibly honest about that, told his story. This helped many other people and came out the other side of it. But the idea that you could be on the very first moon landing and feel inferior 'cause you're second and not first, and a lot of that was pressure from his father.

[00:46:29] Francis French: But wow, what a. What a story other people became more of who they were gonna be anyway, I think is the way of putting it. They amplified things they were already thinking about. Jim Irwin on Apollo 15 was thinking about the religious aspect of this, and that became the rest of his life, talking about how.

[00:46:45] Francis French: He felt a connection with a deity going to the moon that was amplified coming back. Um, others have done the same. Charlie Duke has become a more evangelical after his moon landing, although it took him many years to get to that point. [00:47:00] Folks, um, such as Ed Mitchell on Apollo 14 got into the more kind of.

[00:47:06] Francis French: Spiritually esoteric side about what does this mean about the cosmos? What does this mean about psychology? What does this mean about the nature of consciousness? Some of which is very scientifically accepted. Other things were very fringe and are still considered out there. So you had some very mainstream engineering guys who were like, we succeeded other guys who were pushing the envelope in all kinds of spiritual and other directions.

[00:47:30] Francis French: Neil Armstrong, of course, is the most interesting one in many ways. 'cause there can only be one. First. He reminds me very much of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. She was my direct boss for many years. Um, I got to work with Neil quite a bit too, but he was never my boss in the way that Sally was.

[00:47:46] Francis French: And I, there was a lot of commonalities between now I thought Sally was a very private person, was not a spotlight seeker. Part of which I think is the reason both of them were chosen to be first is they were not. Fame Moners, they [00:48:00] were going to do the mission. But then you come back and you're a very shy, private person.

[00:48:04] Francis French: You're suddenly one of the most famous names in the world. For example, Sally Rides a Billy Joel Lyric. How many astronauts are Billy Joel lyrics? Not that she's the only one as far as I know. What do you do? You become more yourself, but you become, you deal with it in a certain way. I noticed both of them had absolutely no problem in a very calm, measured way of saying no when most of us would feel some kind of level of guilt.

[00:48:27] Francis French: The amount, the sheer number of requests, those two got all the time, the sheer number of people coming at them all the time, and that was part of my job was Sally, was to sort of create a barrier around her. You couldn't say yes to everything. You couldn't say no to everything you had to choose so to watch.

[00:48:43] Francis French: And I learned a lot from this to watch two human beings go, well no, I don't wanna do that right now. With no judgment. With no offense, with no trying to make the other person feel better. Just a very measured, you couldn't take offense at it, but you understood the message. They both had to learn that they were [00:49:00] private, shy people who had they not had that experience, probably would never have become as efficient in going.

[00:49:06] Francis French: You know, there are certain times I want to close my door and it's just me, and thank you very much will now leave me alone. Very, very interesting to see how they both did it with class and grace and a dignity that most of us couldn't sustain over that amount of time. The experience I think, of being in space with Sally or going to the moon with Neil is.

[00:49:26] Francis French: In many ways outweighed by the amount of public interest in them. Thank goodness there was public interest in them. Thank goodness people got excited about them. But what it does to an individual can be difficult and challenging. So to look at all of the people who came back from the moon and what happened to them, it's all very, very different and really intriguing.

[00:49:45] Francis French: There's a whole talk we could do just about those 24 and what happened to them. 

[00:49:51] John Mulnix: It was transformational for the astronauts who flew to space, and especially so for those who went to the moon during the Apollo program. [00:50:00] Going to the moon also transformed our understanding of what's possible for us. As a species.

[00:50:08] Rebecca Boyle: Yeah. I think that there is something sacred about it in terms of the, the transcendence of human ingenuity, like to literally transcend the planet is, is, it is crazy that we did that. It really is, if you think about it, it's far enough in history now. You know, I wasn't even born and like my parents remember it.

[00:50:26] Rebecca Boyle: It's pretty far in the past and so it's easy to kind of lose sight of that. And I think we're spoiled by science fiction too in a lot of ways. Like it seems like, oh, it's no big deal. Like The Expanse and Star Wars, you know, any number of like science fiction shows and, and like world building little empires that we have, I think fool us into thinking space travel is this everyday thing.

[00:50:46] Rebecca Boyle: And it's still so far out of reach that the moon landings are still an absurd thing that we pulled off when we did. Even now, I mean, we're, we're in the middle of the Artemis program. Maybe next fall they're gonna orbit the moon again. [00:51:00] Hopefully. And, you know, that's gonna be super exciting. And I'm, I'm really amped about that.

[00:51:04] Rebecca Boyle: But it also is like taken 18 months between missions and it's, it's just, it's hard is the thing. It really actually is technically difficult to do. And so I think it is, yeah, like this, like seminal moment in human history. And I think it does rise to the level of like a sacred event where it's like the entire world paid attention, the entire world cared about it.

[00:51:24] Rebecca Boyle: The entire world was changed by this, and I think we should, you know, keep that in mind that it really was transformative. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book. Was that sort of the friction between that feeling and the fact that there's so much more the moon has to say. I think like even as a kid, I was awed by Apollo.

[00:51:46] Rebecca Boyle: I was obsessed with it. I listened to the recordings. I like had I went to space camp, you know, I had like my room was full of like NASA posters and Neil Armstrong pictures and all this stuff. It was just a huge moment for me, even though [00:52:00] I wasn't even alive for it. But at the same time, there was part of me that was like almost offended, but that's not all there is that.

[00:52:07] Rebecca Boyle: It's amazing, and I love the Apollo program and I love reading books about the history of it and talking to the people who are still around who were part of it. But a big part of me has always been like, there's more there though. There's more to say about the moon and our history with it and our relationship to it.

[00:52:22] Rebecca Boyle: That goes beyond a bunch of dudes walked up there a half century ago, but I do think that it is still despite that, despite my my sort of like, you know, being defensive about the moon, I think that Apollo still is an absurdly transformative thing and it will be hard for anything to live up to that I think.

[00:52:45] Francis French: I think the moon, as we experience it, is now quite different in many human lifetimes because people have actually been there. They've been close enough satellites took pictures, but that's not the same as the human experience. And I think talking to the people who went to the moon, I get that very much.

[00:52:59] Francis French: You look back in [00:53:00] history and you look at the people were thinking at one time, the moon was a flat disc a mirror, and the different dimples, you could see naked eye on it. We're actually reflecting the oceans and continents where we have. The idea that it was only a few centuries ago when in the Galilean era possibly he was not the first person to look at the moon through a telescope, but he was certainly the first person to record it that we know of.

[00:53:20] Francis French: And just to begin to see that kind of detail. But then humans to go there and come back, that's another thing. Uh, Mike Collins, who was on Apollo 11, talks about that when he come, came back, he's looking up in from the street, seeing the moon in the sky, and it kind of shocks him. He's like, I was there, but that's the same familiar moon I've known my whole life.

[00:53:37] Francis French: And then there was this other moon I went to. And so the difference between those two experiences, it was almost like these guys had two moons in their mind. And it's cliche to ask astronauts when you look up at the moon. Now, what do you think? Um, but nevertheless, if you're around these guys, enough things happen.

[00:53:56] Francis French: And um, I spent a lot of time with Al Wood and at his house in [00:54:00] Florida, we would spend many weeks there. Interviewing for the books. We go out and drink. We go out and watch shuttle launches. We do all kinds of stuff. And then there would be astronaut scholarship, um, events where there would be anybody who went to the moon, who was still around, who did public events, was there.

[00:54:15] Francis French: And I remember leaving Al's house once and the full moon was up and he just looks at it and goes, yeah, my old friend. And I just thought, ah, it was completely off the cuff. It was probably done for an audience of one who he knew would appreciate it, but it wasn't thought out. It was just like, yep, he knew the moon very well.

[00:54:37] Francis French: 'cause he spent so much time studying it from a geological point of view, learning everything about. What they understood at that time, it was made of looking very specifically for certain features so people could learn more. There's scientific work going on that's still unpacking what he brought back from those six days.

[00:54:56] Francis French: So this guy knew the moon innately. And so to be standing next to somebody who go, [00:55:00] who not only says. I know it, but I went there. I don't know if you've ever had this experience. There are a lot of mountains around where I am in San Diego and I love to climb those mountains and there's a difference between when you look at a mountain and go, one of these days, I'm gonna climb that big, impossible looking peak, and then the time when you drive by it on the freeway and go, I climbed that.

[00:55:22] Francis French: That little internal satisfaction and knowledge that I think is the difference they had coming back.

[00:55:34] John Mulnix: What Rebecca and Francis have reminded us is that the moon is both familiar and foreign, a mirror and a mystery. And now we've mapped it, photographed it, and even walked on it. But the story of the moon isn't finished. Still speaking to us. We went there to prove something to each other, and we came back understanding more about ourselves.[00:56:00] 

[00:56:03] John Mulnix: That's it for this episode. Make sure you've subscribed to the podcast so you catch part three. We came in peace for all mankind. That episode will feature Dr. Roger Lanius and Jim Remar. Like I said earlier, these episodes take a lot of time to produce, so I would love if you could leave me a rating or review or the show.

[00:56:23] John Mulnix: It really does help more people find out about the podcast. If you have any questions or comments, shoot me an email, john@thespaceshot.com. I'd love to hear from you. You can also leave me a message that I can play on an upcoming q and a series for the lunar era. Just message or call 7 2 0 7 7 2 7 9 8 8.

[00:56:46] John Mulnix: If you'd like me to play your question, just let me know that it's okay to use the audio and I will be sure to play that question in the upcoming Q and a series. I'm really excited for these upcoming episodes and it's been just a [00:57:00] delight to talk with all of these authors and thought leaders in the space community.

[00:57:04] John Mulnix: Thanks to Francis and Rebecca for joining me to talk about their books and the work that they've been doing to cover the greatest human story yet. So be sure to follow along and make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes. Until next time, I'm John Micks and I'll catch you on the flip side.